Many power plants employ gas turbines as a source of power to satisfy at least part of consumers' overall electrical demand. To ensure healthy long-term operation, plant facility owners typically schedule maintenance or service for their plant assets at regular intervals. Maintenance intervals for gas turbines are often defined in terms of factored fired hours, whereby maintenance is schedule for a set of gas turbines after the turbines have run for a defined number of factored fired hours (e.g., 32,000 factored fired hours) since the previous maintenance activity. The maintenance interval is typically defined based on an expected parts-life consumption for the gas turbine.
Plant operators sometimes peak-fire their gas turbines above their base capacity during peak demand periods. Peak-firing gas turbines above their base capacity produces extra power output when needed, but at the expense of faster parts-life consumption. If gas turbines are peak-fired often within the maintenance interval (or maintenance life), the incremental parts-life consumption may cause the maintenance interval to be shortened. As a result, maintenance schedules are pulled in and extra customer service agreement charges may be incurred. Consideration of these extra maintenance costs, in terms of more frequent servicing of the gas turbines, can lead plant asset owners to exercise peak-fire mode more conservatively than necessary, which may result in missed revenue opportunity.
The above-described deficiencies of gas turbine operations are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of current technology, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the state of the art, and corresponding benefits of some of the various non-limiting embodiments described herein, may become further apparent upon review of the following detailed description.